“retiring” books

I’m afraid this recent trip was the end of my trusty old Hackett collection of Leibniz essays (and it really is a fine selection). It was battered and torn in various ways as I took it along to Maastricht.

I was planning to keep it for awhile in its semi-torn condition. But then, amazingly, I found a pile of about 8 copies in Cairo yesterday, on sale for under $2 apiece. So I bought a new one (why didn’t I buy the whole stack to have them on hand as gifts? not thinking clearly at the time). And so my old one is about to be “retired,” in the Philip K. Dick sense of the term.